Given that this Belfast-set true-crime thriller is based on real-life events from 2004, it appears like one thing which may have made a gripping, splashy top-tier characteristic. But as an alternative this feels underpowered and apologetic, clumsily assembled and blandly directed by Colin McIvor, whose filmography of TV and low-budget comedies doesn’t point out a specific aptitude for the world. The two primary male headliners, Eddie Marsan and Éanna Hardwicke, are superb, though it’s a must to surprise why Marsan, character actor of renown as he could also be, was forged as an alternative of an area actor. Was everybody else busy capturing Game of Thrones spinoffs?
Marsan does a reasonably good job nailing the Belfast accent, however nonetheless he’s a recessive sort of presence and an odd alternative for the function of Richard Murray, an uptight bank supervisor compelled to cooperate with the robbers when his spouse Celine (Eva Birthistle) is kidnapped. Murray has to cooperate with one of many bank’s safety guards, Barry (Hardwicke, giving the extra dynamic efficiency), who additionally has a liked one being held captive, to pack up hundreds of thousands of used bank notes and disguise them as garbage that’s being collected simply earlier than Christmas. The bank robbers themselves are a reasonably undifferentiated lot, other than a deliciously skeevy character (JB Moore) who’s guarding Barry’s mom (Andrea Irvine). He’s the sort of scumbag that basically places some welly into cleansing the sink after he makes use of it in his hostage’s dwelling, and never in the type of manner that implies he’s solely anxious about fingerprints.
There’s a faint suggestion that the robbers are from the IRA as is outwardly generally assumed now, however the Troubles listed here are largely historical past seen in the characters’ psychological rearview mirrors. That rigidity between previous and future Northern Ireland is in itself one of many wealthy seams the script might have mined extra completely, together with a subplot about how Murray was being pressured by the bank’s house owners to make half the employees redundant simply earlier than the vacations.
That final subject is of explicit curiosity to safety chief Mags (Michelle Fairley), who’s anxious about her personal future, however that strand is simply left hanging, which is a waste of Fairley. In the top it feels just like the film-makers had neither the finances nor the imaginative and prescient to make the fabric sing, making for a most unusual work.
